Steel For Fuel N° 027 of 56 29 Oct 2024
The US is a natural gas superpower
by Andy Lubershane, Partner and Head of Research, Energy Impact Partners
In this note
The question
What does American natural gas at this scale buy, abroad and at home?
The answer
Abroad, geopolitical leverage. At home, a demand surge makes new gas generation close to unavoidable, leaving the question of how to future-proof it.
03The argument
Two claims sit behind the title, unequal in size. The export one is about leverage: he calls it undeniable that the US is a global natural gas superpower, and cargoes shifted from Asia to Europe fast enough after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to prove it. The domestic one gets more space. Many net-zero scenarios from a few years earlier assumed investment in new gas power was waning; instead the sector met a demand surge utilities cannot build fast enough to meet. So he treats new gas plants as near-term unavoidable, which turns the question into a design one. If these units may eventually run almost no hours, build them where those hours still pay. One of his favorite answers is distributed gas: gensets more efficient, cleaner and quieter than typical diesel backup generators, approved to run many more hours outside emergencies, selling peaking capacity to the grid while keeping resilience value for their own site, so a tightening carbon limit strands less of them.
04What you need to know first
- Capacity
- On call to supply power when the grid needs it, paid separately from energy delivered.
05Details worth keeping
- The charts come from S&P Global via the New York Times, the EIA, and a colleague’s research.
- The announced-plant surge is only in that chart, not in the text.
06Claims worth citing
All figures as stated on 2024-10-29.
- US exports of liquefied natural gas in 2023 held about five times the energy of all US solar generation, footnoted as 1,270 terawatt-hours against 238. Lubershane
- North American LNG export capacity is on track to double by 2030. Lubershane
- Serving tens of gigawatts of new demand in three to five years without new gas-fired generation, alongside renewables, batteries and other resources, is practically impossible to imagine. Lubershane
07Where it’s contested
Nobody argues back. The title drops a hedge the body keeps: fracking is the most impactful advance “so far”, gas the biggest story “for now”, with solar and batteries expected to outrun it. That the surge lasts long enough to justify the plants is assumed, not defended.